An Indonesian man waits for customers at a street money changer in Jakarta on August 28, 2013.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Welcome to the emerging-markets feeding frenzy.

Those who have been paying attention for the past few weeks will be well aware that EM assets and currencies have been under pressure ever since the Fed signaled it’s preparing to call time on the cheap money era.

Another interesting wrinkle stems from the efforts undertaken by central banks around the world to prop their currencies up. (They don’t mind a bit of currency weakness, and quite frankly they may have to make the best of a lot of it from here on in, regardless of concerns around imported inflation.)

The sense was that under-pressure central banks looked ready and willing to fight back aggressively. Not in a coordinated manner, but still.

Tuesday, the Turkish central bank took a very different path. Traders had expected the central bank governor to fight fire with fire, and maybe to signal rises in benchmark interest rates to prop up the drooping lira. Instead, Erdem Basci was steadfast. The central bank there is sticking to its previous plan of dollar sales and a higher lending rate, but isn’t dropping hints of anything new.

Just as Brazil’s tougher stance boosted other, similar currencies last week, so Turkey’s stance this week seems to be denting the lira’s peers. Is there really anything central banks can do about this now?

“There was a time when rate hikes from the central banks could have made a difference. But that time has passed,” said Bartosz Pawlowski, global head of emerging-markets strategy at BNP Paribas in London. “Most of them are behind the curve. And if they did hike rates aggressively, stocks would get destroyed. Equity investors would head for the exits, and that would weaken the currencies further. People are thinking that maybe the authorities in emerging markets have dropped the ball.”

Time, maybe, for the debate to shift away from what central banks can or want to do to hold this down, and towards what impact significantly weaker currencies will have on their economies for the long term.